The present invention relates to a turnout or crossover section of railway track and particularly but not exclusively relates to providing a temporary non-intrusive turnout or crossover section of a railway track. 2. Description of Related Art
Railway track requires to be maintained at regular intervals and in order to do this, the section of track that is being maintained must be cleared of trains. The track is normally closed to traffic often during no train periods and also out-with such periods thus causing train cancellations or trains being diverted to other routes for short or longer terms (blockades). In some instances, the trains are transferred from the track having the maintenance performed on it onto an adjacent track for a limited period (i.e. a few-hours) and then back onto the original track. The trains are transferred onto the adjacent track by means of a crossover section of track and returned by means of a second crossover. This is known in the art as “Single Line Working” (SLW). Conventionally, each of the crossover sections are intrusive, in that the section of track at which the crossover section is inserted must be cut; this involves cutting the existing rails of each railway track twice and installing the temporary crossover and also installing the switchgear along with providing an interface for signalling. However, such an intrusive crossover section is relatively expensive and requires a fairly long time to plan and to install, where the planning stage alone may take in the region of 2 years. The only other known alternative to solve this problem is to allow the trains to crossover at the nearest permanent crossover sections before and after the maintenance site but these may be many miles away and thus if repair or maintenance is required on only a few metres of track, trains may be forced to share one line of track for both directions (i.e. SLW) for many miles or may be extensively diverted onto alternative routes, thus leading to inefficiency and delays.
Those in the rail industry will also realise that there is a conflict between passengers who require train services during the daytime and freight trains which operate during the night and thus there is very little time to effect such repairs and maintenance. The overriding difficulty is access to the track for cost efficient maintenance.
It will be understood by those skilled in the art that a crossover comprises two individual turnouts, where a turnout can be used on its own or can be combined with another turnout to form a crossover.
In the context of this application, it should be noted that a non-intrusive crossover is one that does not pass through the rail to be crossed but instead crosses over the rail to be crossed.